Welcome, everybody, back to our Shalom Bayit (peace in the home) class. B'ezrat Hashem, we’ll work together with Hashem’s help. I always ask Hashem to help me and give me permission to talk to you, and that we should grow together in our relationship with our husbands and with all the people we love in our lives, through the Derech (way) of Torah, and that Hashem should guide us.
I told you that my philosophy on Shalom Bayit is that there are three levels we always have to be thinking about: a practical level, a psychological level, and a spiritual level. I wasn’t sure which way to go, from higher to lower or lower to higher, but they’re all important, and they all have to be dealt with. We’re going to be dealing with our Shalom Bayit on all three of those levels.
Understanding our husbands and ourselves is very important. I’m part of Shalom Bayit. I believe in getting to the source. I believe in really trying to be open, to look and understand who we are, who our husbands are, and how it all works together. There’s always depth to the problem, and it’s not so simple. Every situation has layers and layers that have to be uncovered.
On a spiritual level of understanding our husbands and ourselves, I recently heard a tape and a lecture by Rabbi Moshe Weinberger that made an effect on me, and it really founded as much to the core as anybody could get about the problem of the differences between men and women. He says that it goes all the way back to Adam HaRishon. You can’t get further back than that. It goes back to Adam HaRishon, who was created from the dust of the earth, and Hashem told him, “You were created from the dust of the earth, and you will go back to the dust of the earth.” That left Adam HaRishon with a big self-esteem problem. It left Adam HaRishon feeling, “Am I really only dust? Am I only made from dust, and I’ll go back to dust?” Man comes into the world with a feeling of inferiority, with a feeling of needing to prove to the world that he’s more than dust.
Starting to sound a little familiar? There’s a feeling of having to build himself up, at least in the eyes of those around him, to make them feel that he is not as inferior as he was first led to believe. So Hashem tells the man that he’s from dust and will return to dust, and he has this feeling—a complex, almost, to a different degree in each man. But at the basis of him, man has a complex that he is inferior and has to prove himself to the people around him.
Woman, on the other hand, wasn’t created from dust. She was created from man himself. She comes from a chashuv (important) source. She doesn’t have that same problem. She knows who she is, and she has a very nice sense of self. She feels worthy. She feels important, and she knows that what she does is important. She’s not dust. She may be treated like dust, but she’s not dust, and she doesn’t feel like dust.
But what does she feel? She feels that she was disconnected from Adam. She was taken away from him. She was pulled apart from him. She was a piece of his body that was severed, and therefore she longs to reattach. She longs to get that close. She wants that closeness back with her husband. She wants to be a part of his life. She wants that emotional connection to him. She wants even the physical connection to him. She wants to be a part of him. She used to be a part of him, and she wants to be a part of him.
So really, psychologically, they go hand in hand with this spiritual level of what’s going on here with man’s mentality and woman’s mentality. It comes from the spiritual level. It comes to the core of what we need in our life.
Very often we talk about the differences between men and women. This goes back to my very, very early Shalom Bayit classes that I used to teach. The first thing we would discuss was those differences between men and women. We always said—and you might have heard it in many classes—that a man needs respect, and a woman needs connection and emotion. She wants appreciation. She wants affection. She wants that connection with her husband. He wants respect.
If we now understand it in terms of what Rabbi Weinberger is saying, he’s saying that it goes back to the core of the way people were created. Adam wants respect because he feels that he is dust. He wants to build up his self-esteem and his confidence in himself. Therefore, his essence in life is going to be defined by how much respect he gets. How much respect he gets from his wife will affect their Shalom Bayit. How much respect he gets from the people around him will affect his relationship with those around him. Men are going to be very, very strongly affected by the amount of respect they are given.
On a practical level, a wife who understands this in her husband will go to the extreme of extremes to show her husband respect. She knows it’s his essence. She knows it’s what gives him the air that he breathes. She knows he cannot be happy without that respect. She therefore treats him like a king. We’ve heard that. It irks us. It’s not the modern woman’s theory of living in this world. But modern theory doesn’t bring happiness. What brings happiness? Making your husband feel respected and secure in your relationship. He will be kinder to you. He will be kinder to the children. He will be nicer to get along with. He will be easier to live with, and he will make you a happier person in response.
If he’s not getting that respect, he’s going to feel so empty and so put down that he’s going to have to get to nothingness. Or, on the other hand, he’s going to have to roar like a lion constantly to show how strong he really is, even though no one is treating him as if he is strong. That’s something we’re going to keep in mind as we go through the different levels I want to discuss with you.
They also say about the difference between men and women, if we want to put it on a spiritual level, that when you have the Aseret HaDibrot (Ten Commandments), you have Kabed et avicha ve'et imecha (Honor your father and your mother) on the side of between man and Hashem, not on the side of between man and man. One side is to believe in God and keep Shabbat, and the things considered between man and God. The other side is not to steal, not to kill, not to commit adultery, and the things between man and man. But Kabed et avicha ve'et imecha is put on the side between man and God, and one of the reasons is that husband and wife represent God in the way that they create human life. When a person learns to respect their parents, that is their way of learning how to respect God. We represent Hashem in the world to our children, to our offspring.
They say about a husband and a wife that the husband represents the part of Hashem that is Din, judgment, and the woman represents the part of Hashem that is Rachamim, mercy. Hashem has two main names that we call Hashem with, Elohim and Yud Kei Vav Kei, and we say that Yud Kei Vav Kei is Rachamim and Elohim is Din, judgment. Very often in a relationship—and it’s not always the way it is, because sometimes we switch roles—but generally speaking, very often the man will take the tougher role, and he’ll be the Din, judgment; he’ll be strictness. The wife is supposed to have that feeling with her children, her surroundings, and her life that it’s more Rachamim, more mercy. That’s going to be a woman’s role. Together they must blend, staying their own way, not forcing each to be different. Together they must blend to represent Hashem in the world.
So we have to know that each of our differences is okay. We’re allowed to have differences, and we don’t have to be the same. If we respect our differences and understand our differences, then we’re okay.
Let’s go a little bit into the psychology of what I’m trying to lead up to here. In psychology, they’ll tell us that a man lives in a world that is highly competitive. A man lives in a world where he’s constantly trying to prove his status. Your husband may go every day to shul (synagogue), and B'ezrat Hashem he has his class, but there’s competition. There’s who’s going to ask a dumb question and who’s going to ask a smart question, who the rabbi looks at and says, “You got the points,” and who is going to be almost mocked in the class. There’s competition, and there’s a feeling in men that they have to be on top. It’s almost a survival issue. They’re afraid more than anything else to be put down. They’re in a competitive world.
They go to work, and there’s a lot of competition there, too. It’s a place where they have to prove their worth. They have to constantly prove their worth. You make a mistake, and it could be held against you. You don’t make enough contacts with business, it’s not going to go right. Your sales aren’t up as high as they should be. Constantly, constantly, a man is under pressure to prove himself. A man is under pressure in his world to prove himself, to raise his status, to raise his feeling of respect in the world. That’s what he—he survives on that. That’s what he has to do.
A man also wants to make sure that he can struggle to preserve his independence. He has to be a man. From when he was born, he was told to be a big boy, not to cry, to do things yourself, to be strong, to be powerful. That macho instinct a man has is part instinct, part survival: he must perform. He must be strong. He must live up to that status.
Men look at each other and judge each other on who is higher up on that ladder. When men get together to talk, they automatically assess the crowd. They automatically look around to see who’s the big shot here, who has the right to say something and who doesn’t. If it’s a group of learning men, who’s the top learner? If it’s a group of business men, who’s the top business man? That’s going to be the guy who talks, and everyone else is going to listen, because he’s the one with the status. He’s the one with that upper rung, and the men all know it. That’s the way they deal in life, and they strive to get on that higher rung. It’s either one up or one down in their life. It’s a battle for survival, to be on a higher level in their status: highly competitive and with a lot of pressure. That’s the man’s world.
A woman’s world is a world of connections. We use conversation and negotiations for closeness. We want to support each other. We want intimacy. We want emotional connection in our life. Women will come into a group of women and look for what’s similar about us, not what sets us apart. We’ll look at the group and connect either through our children, our problems, or whatever way we can. But we really want to connect. We don’t want to be superior. We want to be equal. We would even rather be inferior than superior.
If I’m in a crowd of women and we’re talking about our problems or our situations in life, and someone says in the group, “How—let’s say”—and we shouldn’t be talking, and I shouldn’t be, so I’m just in a hypothetical situation—and a woman is going to be saying how hard it is for her and how her husband is not so nice to her, and he doesn’t listen to her and whatever, the other woman is going to say, “Oh, my husband is a doll. He brings me flowers. He brings me presents. He is the sweetest thing. Oh, my husband...” So right away, the woman says, “I don’t really like this lady. We don’t really connect. And who does she think she is anyway?” And that’s the end of their connection.
But if the woman is pouring out her heart and the other woman tells her, “I know what you mean. My husband does that, too, and this is the way I handle it, and it doesn’t always work,” she might even say, “My situation is worse. Oh, you think that’s bad? Listen to my situation.” She won’t hide her problems. She’ll share her problems, because when they finish talking, they feel close. They feel connected. They feel warm. They have that emotional connection.
So a woman’s world is not so competitive. We want to be together. We want to be a part of each other. We’re looking for that emotional connection. We would rather tell our problems because telling our problems makes us closer to the people around us.
A man will not tell his problems. A man walks into the crowd and says he made the best deal. He knows the best way to go. He knows the right directions to take, knows the right moves to make, because if he lets up and shows weakness, they’ll shun him. In a man’s world, when he’s down, he’s out. In a woman’s world, when she’s down, she’s embraced.
So to the man, he wants nothing of weakness. He doesn’t want to show problems. He doesn’t want to talk about weaknesses. He has to put up a facade of being perfect and in control, whereas a woman is very happy to show her needs, and in that way we connect.
Even in the way boys and girls play as children, we find differences. Boys’ sports are so competitive. My goodness, I see the way boys play and realize why Hashem gave me only girls. There are times when I’m going to stop in the middle of the street and stop boys from killing each other, and then I have to force myself to keep moving. Even my girls now—God bless them—who have sons, they’ll tell me, “Ma, they do that, but they’re killing each other.” But they do that. Boys will be very competitive in their sports. There has to be a winner and a loser. You can’t have a game with boys where there’s no winner or loser. Someone has to win and somebody loses. That’s what it means to play a game. You can’t tell them, “No, but we all won. Everybody won. It’s a tie. We all won.” The boys will not handle that at all. Somebody has to win and somebody has to lose.
What were the girls’ games traditionally? Hopscotch, jump rope. Who wins in jump rope? I’ve jumped rope the first 15 years of my life nonstop, but I can’t tell you if I ever won in jump rope. There’s no winning and losing. It’s not something that’s competitive. It’s something that’s synchronized. The beauty of it was that I know when to jump in and she knows when to jump out, and we’re going to have it all perfectly synchronized because we’re connected. We’re going to sing the song the right way, and everybody’s going to jump in and jump out at the right time, because girls want to be part and connected and together, and it doesn’t have to be win and lose. I don’t even want to win, because that makes you lose, and if you lose, you may not like me anymore. So we would rather everybody win.
We’re going to play house and play mommy, but there’s not going to be a winner and a loser. The boys are going to play football and basketball and sports and games, but there’s a definite winner. You have to see my little grandson play. He comes to my house, and anything he does, he needs a paper and pencil because he’s going to write down the score for eternity. He’s going to save it forever. Whatever he’s going to do, he’s going to write it down. He’s going to keep it forever.
A girl could say, “Oh, I don’t know what I got. I don’t know what I did.” But the boy’s going to have the score because in life a man has the competition in his mind that he has to score. He has to be on top, and he can’t show weakness. A woman is going to have a different feeling altogether. She wants to blend. She wants to unite. She wants to be emotionally connected to the people around her. She’d rather even show herself inferior than superior. Okay, that’s as different as day and night. Those are very, very different. Inferior means that she’ll show herself weaker, and superior is like super, the word super. They’re on top. Okay, no problem.
The differences here really define the problems we have in our Shalom Bayit. If we could really analyze all of our problems, a lot of them come back to this basic understanding. There’s a difference, for instance, in expressing sympathy. When we express sympathy to one another, it could be interpreted as an expression of human connection. If I feel bad for you in what you’re going through, a woman will really take to that in a very warm way. You understand, you care. It’s something cozy. It’s something warm.
But that same sympathy could also be looked at as you being in a superior position and me being in the inferior position. A man will more likely take sympathy from his wife or from people as a put-down, rather than as a showing of caring. Sometimes when we’re thinking in terms of women and he’s thinking with his man’s mind, it’s very hard for him to show sympathy because sympathy means weakness. Weakness means lack of survival. Weakness is the worst thing in his vocabulary, and sympathy shows that you’re in a position of weakness.
Your husband is going to come in and see you not feeling well, taking care of the children, with a million things to do, and all you want is sympathy. He’s going to tell you, “It’s cold. It’s not so bad, and the kids are on their own anyway. They’re doing what they have to do.” He’s looking at this situation and thinking—he doesn’t know he’s thinking this, by the way—but he’s using his male mentality: “Don’t show weakness. Don’t show weakness.” So he’s going to evaluate the situation in any way he can so as not to show weakness. Sympathy is weakness. We’re not going to show sympathy. Sympathy is weakness.
So he’s thinking in that situation, “I wouldn’t want anybody to think I was weak. So now that my wife is in that situation, she also doesn’t want anybody to think she’s weak.” But he’s wrong. We want him to think that we’re weak and need the sympathy. He’s wrong in that. But I’m telling you why he’s not able to express it, because he flips it around and says, “That’s what I would want. I would want to be looked at as strong. I would not want to be looked at as weak.” So he’s not giving you sympathy because he’s using his own way of understanding the world and transferring it over to what he thinks you want.
It’s like if your husband goes out to buy you an anniversary present and gets you a new electric screwdriver, and he comes home all excited and says, “This is the best electric screwdriver that they have. I went to the top to get it.” You don’t know what kind. It’s like, “Thanks,” but that’s what he would have wanted. So he thinks that’s what you want. Hopefully he’s not on that level where he really can’t figure it out, but sometimes a man does that. He buys her a new blender. It’s like, “Thanks.” It’s not really what she wanted, but he’s using his own—he’s using his own, what’s the word, barometer. He’s using his own way of defining what he would want and transferring that over to what he thinks his wife wants.
Okay, so let’s see. Let’s play that out. And it could be, what does he want sympathy in? I know with me and my husband, he might want me to take care of him, but he still doesn’t want to feel weak. He doesn’t want the sympathy in terms of sympathy because he could look at being taken care of as a Kavod (honor). He could look at being—if he could put it into his own perspective and keep his dignity, then he can handle it. And it doesn’t go across the board for everyone. Every husband is different.
I have one son-in-law, God bless him till 120, let him be well. I cannot do anything for this boy. I want to make food for him. I want to do things for him. I want to do babies for him. I want to do an errand for him. He doesn’t need help, doesn’t need help. He’s as sweet as could be. He’ll smile, you know, and say, “No, Mom, don’t need anything.” For goodness’ sake, I want to do something. He doesn’t need anything. He has that very strong feeling of independence, a very strong feeling that he can take care of himself, and he doesn’t want the help. Some men are not like that. There are different degrees. I have one son-in-law who’s fine with it, but it might be underneath what we’re experiencing and our husbands’ not-understanding part of it—not all of it—because we should understand that they’re coming from a completely different mentality.
I’m just thinking now that my husband hates going to the doctor because he’s dying and bad and he doesn’t have time. It’s weakness. He’s strong at that. He just never goes, right? And I can relate to that as well. My husband, God bless him, until he had a heart problem and couldn’t run it off anymore. He couldn’t just do it on his own anymore. But that was it. You were macho. You have a cold, he said, “The best thing for a cold is to go on an 8 mile run, come home and stay from there, and take a hot shower. You’ll feel great.” That’s it. That’s what you do. So if I don’t feel good and want to stay in bed with tea, he goes, “No, no, no. You go, you do.” There’s a strength. He’s strong. That’s the motto: “I’m fine. I’m better now.” And he was really sick. He’s 3 years old. “I can go. I can do.”
So it’s not anything we’re going to say here with psychology that’s 100% across the board for everybody. But if we can find an understanding of it, and I can understand my husband and not take it personally, really the reason for this is to understand our husbands and not think they’re doing it to be mean. They’re trying to be mean. I shouldn’t look at my husband’s insensitivity or his lack of wanting to show sympathy as a feeling that he’s mean and wants to hurt me. I shouldn’t get so upset if I understand and say, “Well, you know, men are like that, and that’s why he’s thinking like that.” He tells me, “You’ll be better tomorrow,” or “Take 2 aspirins and it’ll be okay,” instead of telling me, “I feel so bad, and are you okay, and should I get you something,” which is what I really want him to say. At least I can be thinking against him. It’s his species as a whole, okay? It’s not really against my own Shalom Bayit, and if that could make me feel better, that’s good too.
Call your mother, you know, even to the point—it’s just a funny thing. My husband, I love him, and he should forgive me for using points. I’ll just say that there are some men I know who’ll take a nap on the couch, and you tell them, “You know, it’s nice he was sleeping for a while.” “No, I wasn’t sleeping. I wasn’t sleeping. I was resting, honey. The alarm clock, you didn’t know? No, no, no, I wasn’t sleeping. I was resting.” He wasn’t sleeping, but it’s weak. It’s a weakness to fall asleep. It’s a weakness to fall asleep on the couch. It’s not so macho. He’s got to say, “No, I wasn’t sleeping. I was resting.”
My girls and I, we almost—it’s like a joke. The kids, I have all my grandchildren over. They’re throwing things, they’re banging, they’re making noises, they’re crazy, and my husband, God bless him, could sleep through it all on the couch. My daughters will look at me and say, “You know, like, he’s just resting. You know, you know, he’s just resting.” Somehow they feel that that’s a weakness, and they can’t admit to any kind of weakness because it’s against their survival. They have to show their status, or else they lose. If you lose, you’re out. If you lose, you’re going to lose. That’s how a man feels in his world.
We have to understand that. We have to let him feel strong. We have to let him feel strong. If we don’t let him feel strong, he can’t deal with it. Sympathy is one way that, you know, I once thought of an example of why sometimes I can’t show my husband sympathy. Very often when I do try to show my husband sympathy, he rejects it. He gets annoyed with it. He doesn’t really like it. Some people’s husbands may like it, may be the type to want it, but when I try to—if I’m upset that he had a bad day at work, or I say, “You know, oh, they were really—you know, they really weren’t nice to you, or they didn’t treat you with respect,” or whatever—it’s like, “Oh, no, it wasn’t like that. It was fine.” He doesn’t get that same feeling I would think I’d get if I were being sympathized with and understood. He pushes it off. He doesn’t enjoy it. He really doesn’t enjoy it. He doesn’t enjoy it. He would say, “I feel okay. I’m better. I’m better,” a lot of the times when I try to sympathize.
“You had such a hard day at work, and I don’t like the way they treat you.” Very often women think they’re sympathizing with their husbands by telling them that they don’t treat you well enough at work, they don’t give you what you’re worth at work, they’re not respecting you. “How do you let them push you around like that? How do you let them treat you like that?” You think you’re being on his side, and he really doesn’t like that. He takes it as a put-down. He feels lower than he felt before. What’s he supposed to do, come home and stay from there? Yeah, right, right, they come home, right.
They come home unhappy from work, and you think they need sympathy, but sympathy is going to make them feel like more of a failure, and it’s the last thing he really wants. He doesn’t want you to say, “You know, it’s terrible they treat you like a nothing over there.” Everything you say like that digs him deeper and deeper into his hole, and he has to look at it in the face, and he has to know that you know it. He’d rather you don’t know it, because at least you should think he’s a big shot. Okay, you should.
If he brings it up and he’s talking about work, sometimes I’m able to build him up and tell him that they don’t realize how great you really are. “Yeah, but I know that’s not the truth. You know, that’s not the truth. You know, they don’t know it, but you know it.” I know it, and sometimes he says, “No, you’re just biased.” I say, “I’m not. I’m really not.” But the truth is, I really mean it. I know how hard you work, and I know how much you do. Of course they’re going to criticize anyway, because people criticize. But the 99.9% of the time that you’re doing great, you’re doing great. He needs to be built up. He needs to be made to feel strong, and he doesn’t want to look weak. He doesn’t want to look weak in your eyes.
Sometimes the sympathy we give a husband is misinterpreted as weakness, and they feel like we know they did something wrong. We know people aren’t respecting them, and it makes them even more hurt. It makes them even more down. A woman always has to be thinking in her mind, with her husband, “How can I make him feel special? How can I make him feel respected? How can I make him feel strong? How can I give him that feeling that he’s great at what he’s doing? He’s doing a great job.” That’s what a man needs from his wife. He doesn’t want the sympathy. He wants that—he wants to be out and giving help.
When a woman is helped by the people around her, she feels loved and connected. We love to help each other. You walk into someone’s kitchen a little early. You were invited for dinner or something. You’re going to come in and say, “Let me cut the salad, and let me do this, and let me help you get ready,” and we’re going to help each other, and hopefully that’s going to make us feel close.
Personally, I like everybody out of my kitchen. Women can help women, help each other, and feel good about it. When we offer a man help, again, it hits him as a sign of weakness. When we offer him help—he’s putting together something, you get a toy for the kid that needs 17,000 pieces put together, and he’s putting it together, and it’s not quite connecting, and you look over his shoulder and say, “Why don’t you try?” He doesn’t like that. “I know what I’m doing. That piece doesn’t belong.” Now he will never ever put that piece in, and the thing has three legs instead of four because he doesn’t want to look like he was weak. He doesn’t want it to look like he didn’t know and you had to tell him.
But if he came into the kitchen while you were preparing and said, “Honey, can I cut that for you?” “Yeah, great.” Okay, we’re not going to like how he cut it afterwards, and we’re going to cut it ourselves again anyway. But the point is, again, men and women interpret asking for help and wanting help differently. A man interprets help as a weakness, and he won’t even enjoy help unless he asks for it himself.
A woman sees help as a sign of love and caring, and the highest level of love and caring she’ll get is if somebody helps her without her even having to ask for it. The highest level in a woman’s mind of that closeness and special care is: “Oh my goodness, she came, she brought me dinner. She knew I didn’t feel good. I didn’t even ask her. Unbelievable.” There’s no closer feeling than that. It’s not the same as saying, “Would you pick up dinner for me because I don’t feel good?” That’s nice enough. She did it. But if she did it without even being told, unbelievable. What a closeness. You’ll never forget that. You’ll be telling that story till the end of days: “And she got it for me, and I didn’t even ask her.”
A man doesn’t take it that way. A man feels that if you offer your help and I didn’t ask for it, it could be a put-down. You could be putting yourself in that superior position, thinking that you could help, you know how to do it, he needs help—he is inferior and he’s weak—and he doesn’t like it. If he asks you for help, he wants you to help him. But if he didn’t ask for your help, it might be an insult.
Now, of course, each couple has to figure out their own husbands. But if I ask him to help him with something—very often he’s putting something together, he’s even working on the checkbook or whatever he’s doing—and I say, “You want me to do that for you?” “No, I got it. I got it.” He doesn’t do it. He doesn’t want it because it’s a sign of weakness to a man to accept help. Asking directions is a sign of weakness. A woman is very happy to ask directions. She likes to ask directions. Asking directions means we could help each other. We could, like, get close. You walk away from this lady on the street who you don’t know and will never see before in the rest of your life, but you’re thinking she’s so nice. We sort of connected, you know? We have this emotional connection because she told you to make a left and then a right and be careful to go here or there, and there’s something there that’s a warmth.
A woman will look at giving directions as sharing, as connecting, as emotional, and a man will look at accepting directions as a sign of weakness. He’d rather circle and circle and circle because he’s got it. He knows it. He wanted to see that same restaurant six times. He knows he was here six times already. It’s on the seventh time that he’s going to turn the other way. That’s his, you know, that’s his ego. That’s his feeling that he can’t be wrong.
How do you try to tell him to leave? Well, I don’t know, the that you get for not telling him, you know. You have to say it in a very subtle way, in a roundabout way, make it sound like it was his idea. You know, you have to go roundabout not to put him down, because he’s going to take it—just know that he’s going to take it as a put-down. It’s being passive. It’s prolonging it, right? My navigator has helped a little bit with that, unless my navigator is in its Alzheimer’s position, you know, where I don’t know what it’s thinking. Well, I hear what you’re saying, and it depends on the urgency of getting to the point where you have to get, but some men are going to take it as more of an insult than others. I’m careful with it. I’m careful with it, and if I could let it go, I let it go. But you do get the that you get is your husband’s happiness, and that makes you happy down the line, right? Right, right.
Sometimes I have the directions. Sometimes I have the directions of the wedding with me, and he says—I say, “Should we read the directions?” And he goes, “No, no, no. I don’t need the directions. I know where I’m going.” I say, “Okay, but I just want to look at it anyway,” and I’ll be looking at it and say, “Oh, that’s funny. They say to do this, this or that.” Okay, no problem. In a subtle way, I’m talking to myself. I’m looking at the directions. “Oh, there’s another way of doing it too.” His way is right. There’s another way that they’re talking about, also. He’s not unique in there. Your position in your life is not unique. That’s a part of it, coming from that basic need of a man to be right.
It also has—I was thinking of this recently, just today, when I was going it over in my mind: How come men can’t say they’re sorry? How come men can’t admit that they were wrong? So many times in Shalom Bayit a woman will cry to me about that. “Why do I always have to say I’m sorry, even if I’m right? I have to say I’m sorry. How come he can’t say he’s sorry? How come he can’t admit he’s wrong?” It’s the same thing. It’s survival. He’s drowning. We don’t realize, we don’t realize how much the air he breathes is connected to a tube that needs to be on top, that needs to be right.
The reason why it makes me feel better is that if I understand it, then I’m going to let it go a little bit more. Like the comment that I just made: if I understand that he really—say he’s sorry, and if I force him to say he’s sorry, it’s going to throw him into a depression almost. It’s going to make him feel—and we shouldn’t want that at the moment of your argument. You might think you want that, but you really don’t want that because it’s his essence. It’s not about the issue on one level. Intellectually, he might—he knows, I think he knows he was wrong, and he can’t say it because if he says it, he has to really accept his low status, and he can’t.
When you’re wrong, you’re wrong. A woman doesn’t have the same problem saying, “I’m sorry.” I could say I’m sorry even if I’m right, because I can say I’m sorry that I hurt you, even if I was doing the right thing and had to do it and wasn’t wrong. I’m sorry that it led to problems. I’m sorry it caused all of this tension between us. I am sorry. I’m sorry about the whole situation. I wish it didn’t happen. It doesn’t necessarily mean that I’m wrong, but I could say it because I have that self-esteem as a woman, that it’s not going to destroy who I think I am and who I know I am. For a man, it will destroy who he wants to be or who he thinks he needs to be.
Okay, it’s a time to ask for sorry. I ask for sorry. I never get back to sorry. Don’t wait for that. But one day in a year—well, that’s an extreme, because Hashem really makes it easy for us to say we’re sorry before Yom Kippur, because he gives it to us as a routine thing to do, and most people do, “Do you forgive me? Do you forgive me? Do you forgive me?” It’s not even as meaningful as it should be, but at least it helps those who can’t say “Do you forgive me” to say it. That’s an extreme, and, you know—but whether I could—who would be better at really saying it in a way that it really means something? It would be a woman’s. It’s usually easier for a woman to say she’s sorry, because again, when I tell you I’m sorry, it’ll bring us closer, and when a man says he’s sorry, he admits his guilt. It reaches his core, and it hurts him so strongly that he feels down, and it could hurt his actual self-esteem. It depends on the man. It depends on the situation. It depends on the situation.
But what I’m saying in our Shalom Bayit, I’m not saying that these things are true and right and always happen. If it helps my Shalom Bayit to understand that my husband can’t admit to his weaknesses, won’t say he’s sorry—not because he doesn’t love me, not because he’s inconsiderate, not because he wants to hurt me or even really thinks that he’s always right—it really, if he—I really think it comes from a lack of self-esteem, a lack of security, and not being able to deal with “Sometimes I’m wrong.” They can’t handle it. If I could understand that in my husband and look at it in a different way, I take it lighter when he doesn’t say he’s sorry. I don’t let it hurt me so much.
If I think he can’t say he’s sorry because he’s mean and disgusting, and he doesn’t care about me and thinks he’s always right, then it’s going to hurt my relationship with my husband. I’m not going to have Shalom Bayit in that situation. I’m going to feel resentment. I’m going to think that he’s not a good husband. But if I feel that it’s something men have a hard time with, and it goes to that core of needing to be on top and not to show weakness, and he sees saying he’s sorry as a weakness, I could let it slide a little bit easier. I could not let it affect my Shalom Bayit. I could do it in a way that I could accept it. I could accept it. That’s the way men are. A woman could say, “I’m sorry,” and feel closer, and a man will say he’s sorry and it’ll break him down. I guess that’s every man on his own level.
But the people I’m thinking of, I think they really know when they did something wrong. They know that it’s like a kid. It’s really like a kid when a kid says, “You know, I didn’t do it,” or, “Yeah,” you know. It’s like, why can’t he say he did it? But he knows he did it. Do you have to tell the child that he did it? He knows he did it. It’s right there. It’s in his face. So you push him into saying he’s sorry, and it just makes him angry and resentful and bitter. But if you just say, “Whatever happened, honey, could you just clean up the chocolate from the table?” You know, and you don’t get into the issue of pushing them into saying, “I’m sorry.”
But understand, the truth is that sometimes we can tell our husbands, you know, he’s saying, “But it wasn’t wrong, and I didn’t do wrong, and it wasn’t my fault,” and whatever, and you say, “Fine. It’s not a problem. I understand where you’re coming from. I just want you to know that it would have been more helpful to me like this, or I personally would have liked it like that. But okay.” He doesn’t want to say he’s sorry he did wrong. You’re not going to push it into his face, because you’re not going to push him to a point where he’s going to have to not be happy with who he is.
Yes. The real part of what we’re talking about now is understanding, not so much reacting. First I want to understand my husband and where he’s coming from and why it’s hard for him. I’m not then going to allow everything to go on its own. That’s going to be later on. We’re going to discuss how to react to it, but when we react to it, we’re going to keep in mind what his nature is and how to best work with that nature to affect the change that we hope to be able to affect.
So really, you’re right. I’m not saying that this is the whole thing. You don’t go home from this lesson saying, “He’s allowed to do whatever he wants and say whatever he wants because he’s a man, and that’s the way men are, and that’s it.” But at the beginning, it’s an understanding that we’re coming from a very different emotional source. Our source is togetherness. His source is status. Really, the main thing we can do for our husbands is build their respect and their status. If we can make them feel special, make them feel accomplished, and not put them down—very often our husbands are being put down everywhere else they go. Very often they’re not the top. It’s very hard to be the top, and when they’re not, it hurts them. If they can be the top with you, in your eyes, if you can show him that he is number one in your children’s eyes, if you can teach them to treat their father like he is number one, then at least in his home he has that need, that tremendous need, fulfilled. Then he’s going to be so completely happy in his home because he doesn’t have that fulfilled anywhere else. That’s the trick, and that’s how to make a man happy: to make him feel that sense of superiority that he strives for and needs and doesn’t get anywhere else, but gets in his own home.
So we covered sympathy and giving help and asking directions, all of those. Okay, admitting that we’re wrong, not wanting to admit that they were sleeping. I don’t know what that one was. Right, okay.
It’s also something where our different ways of conversation, the words we use and how we use them, are also going to be defined according to who we are and how we see ourselves. When a man is making plans, and let’s say his friends want to know, “Could we go out for dinner now?” If a man says to his other man friend, “Let me get back to you. I’m going to ask my wife,” he’s going to feel put down. He’s going to feel like, you know, he’s not so macho. “What do you mean I have to ask my wife? You know, hey, who’s divorced anyway?” He’s going to get those comments. Whereas a woman feels very comfortable with her girlfriends saying, “Well, I don’t know. Let me ask my husband.” When she says, “Let me ask my husband,” she feels grateful and thankful that she has a partner in life. She feels like, “Thank God I’m not alone, and I have who to ask, and it’s not just me, and I don’t have to only be living on my own. I’m living with someone else.” She says to her friends, “I have to ask my husband,” and she doesn’t feel it as a put-down. Whereas a man will answer more readily than say, “Let me ask my wife. Let me ask my wife,” right away. Is that, you know, “Who wears the pants in this family anyway?” My husband used to like that comment, you know, because having four daughters and a wife who only wore skirts, he was happy with that. He wore the pants in that family. That’s it. He wore the pants, and, you know, that’s again ways that we relate to each other. The same words mean different things—he’s going to see it as a put-down; we’re going to see it as a way of being close to each other.
So this really is just to start off. It’s a touch of the psychology that goes behind why we say the things we do or do the things we do, how we react to each other. It’s not on a practical level yet. I hope to get to that when we continue on a practical level of what to actually do about it. Okay, so that’s for now. Thank you.